Wednesday, January 14, 2009

The first dose of chemo went into Pablo's little body with no probs. He and Jo Ann had a great night's sleep at CHLA. In fact, our nurse Danica (who has become family to us) changed Pablo's diaper in the middle of the night and let Jo Ann sleep. Huge, cos waking up in the middle of the night to change to dipe is, like, no one's idea of fun.

This morning, Pablo informed mommy that he wanted to walk down the hall to the play room—by himself. He made it part of the way, and came back to the room for a maternal escort. Once they made it into the play room, he played by himself and Jo Ann returned to our luxurious hotelspital suite to hang with Hrishi who'd arrived bright and early with coffee.

In the Keeping My Sanity Through Exercise Department: this morning at 7, I rode up Angeles Crest with my friend Peter Robbins. We became friends a few months ago through Francine. His daughter, a junior at South Pasadena High, went through leukemia treatment at CHLA a few years ago. The leukemia kids are on 4 East—the other end of the hallway from soft tumor kids like Pablo. It's been incredibly cool to have met Peter. Riding a bike brings about great convo to begin with. To share the road with a guy who has not only been through cancer treatment, but has been through it on the same floor of the same hospital—that is priceless. We laugh a lot. We don't have to get too heavy about it all, cos we know precisely what the other guy's talking about. Even though we climbed 4,000 feet and spent two hours on the road, for me the real workout was the chat.